A Bluestocking Knits

There is a lot about genealogy that is amusing — beards, bits of graffitti in church-books — but equally there is a lot that is quite sobering.  Koppor is the Swedish word for smallpox — the priest has marked here each smallpox death with an O.  You don't need to know much at all about smallpox to realize the devastation it must have caused in a country parish like this, that almost all of the deaths were for children under ten years old, most much younger than that.